Photographs by Herbert Randall Jr. 

On Loan from the University of Southern Mississippi

February 15th - March 15th

Performance of Voices of Freedom Summer: February 16th, 6pm

Freedom Summer, also known as the the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive sponsored by civil rights organizations including the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Aimed at increasing black voter registration in Mississippi, the Freedom Summer workers included black Mississippians and more than 1,000 out-of-state, predominately white volunteers. The Ku Klux Klan, police and state and local authorities carried out a series of violent attacks against the activists, including arson, beatings, false arrest and the murder of at least three people.

Herbert Randall was a freelance photographer who was persuaded by the director of the Mississippi Summer Project, to travel to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to document members of the African American community as well as volunteers in their effort to assist with black voter registration in the South.

Herbert Randall Jr. 

Photographer Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. was born on December 16, 1936, in Bronx, New York.

In 1964, Randall received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and was encouraged by Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer's Hattiesburg project, to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Randall photographed volunteers in a variety of projects, including the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign and voter registration drives. One of Randall’s most famous photographs was published that summer, the photo of the bloody and concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland Congregation and former World War II objector. Randall returned to New York in 1965, and served as supervisor of photography for Bedford Stuyvesant Youth In Action, Inc. In 1968, Randall joined the Brooklyn Children’s Museum as a photography instructor, and in his spare time became South Bronx Youth Village’s photographic consultant. Between 1970 and 1974, Randall was the New York City Board of Education Multi-Media Project Coordinator of Photography. During this period, Randall was awarded the Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for photography.

In 1974, the National Media Center Foundation hired Randall as a photographic consultant, where he would remain until 1981, when he moved to the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, New York, and began working as a custodian and school bus driver. In 1999, Randall donated the his photography archives – nearly 2,000 negatives – to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. The school organized a traveling exhibition consisting of one-hundred of the photographs ending in 2003. University of Southern Mississippi Archivist Bobs M. Tusa joined Randall in 2001, to write "Faces of Freedom Summer," which tells the story of Randall’s photographs from Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, Randall’s work was exhibited as a part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Week celebration at Stanford University. Randall’s work has been exhibited at galleries across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore’s Cultural Arts Gallery.

- Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on September 28, 2007.